Here's a creative way to get rid of old hard drives.

Hello all.

Right now, I'm sitting in an internet cafe in Iloilo City, Philippines. It's quite hot and humid and I'm tired and sweaty. But this trip has been a lot of fun. My dad and I came here for the 3rd annual Baptist Pastor's Conference here in Iloilo. There have been a lot of firsts here on this trip.
This has been my first time on a commercial airplane! It was very exciting. 29 houts elapsed from the time we left the Canton-Akron airport to the time we arrived in Iloilo.
This has also been my first time out of the country. Well, I've been to Canada for less than one whole hour, but that doesn't count... It was a little strange to be the foreigner. I just feel like me. But I'm the one getting the strange looks now. Now that I've been here for nearly a week, I'm really getting to enjoy my stay here. I wish I could be here longer. Maybe that will be so next year, Lord willing.

The Pastor's Conference was a wonderful time. I can now say that I've heard 8 sermons in one day! I don't know anywhere else in the world that that can happen.
I'm also learning a few words in the native dialect, Ilonggo.

Well, my time's about up here, so I must be going. I'll write more later.

I've recently been looking into live streaming for our church services. I didn't understand where to get started. I saw tutorials for Linux and wondered if I could pull it off using Windows. Different tutorials said to use different software. So several months ago, I was quite confused and just gave up.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled on a really nice website that gives all the steps to setting up a shoutcast server in Windows. The streaming concept is pretty smart, and that's what I learned about. You use the Winamp plugin to encode the stream and it sends it out to a DNAS server. This is just a program running on a high-speed internet connection that receives the stream from the source and distributes it to clients.

So we now are capable of live streaming our church services on the web!

http://calvarybucyrus.org/live_streaming

What a weird place Ohio is. Wait 5 minutes if you don't like the weather, because it'll change! I know that's a dumb and over-used cliche...

Yesterday, it started getting warm in the afternoon. It was a little chilly in the morning, but rose to the mid-40's after church in the morning. It was windy, but it seems to have been windy for the past several months. There's a random thought for ya' -- when the wind stops... Anyways, it rose to 50 degrees and was quite pleasant for this time of year. At church in the evening, it was windy but sunny. Then it started to rain, and boy did it! The lights flickered a little and you could hear the rain beat on the roof of the church. They buzzed a little more near the end of the service and then the torrent came! It turns out it was hail hitting the roof with blistering speed. My dad couldn't hardly preach with that much noise, so he had to end his sermon rather impromptu, though at the regular time.

After church, I went home and discovered all the lights were off. We were out of power. Instinctively, I tried turning on several light switches, and guess what -- none of them worked! The church had power, the bank had power, BK had power, McD had power, the apartments next door had power, the stores across the street had power, but we didn't. That was kind of stinky.
So we had a candlelight breakfast for dinner after church. Cereal and milk was the specialty of the evening. The power was out from about 7:30 to 9:30pm. They got it on pretty quickly.

Well, after the torrential downpours of the previous evening, today we got a fresh snowfall. I'm beginning to get sick of this cycle. Uggghhh! It should get warm or we should get a huge snowfall that sticks. Well, now it's cold and all that water's going to freeze. Yay.

Hurry up spring!

Yay!!! Today I figured out how to do some AJAX. Yesterday I found a simple script that would perform an AJAX request, but I wanted something a little more in depth. I found just what I needed at

Generally, I avoid Javascript altogether. I really have no need of it and just plain don't like client-side scripting. But this AJAX stuff is pretty cool! If you have any good links or material, please post a comment.

Here's my first AJAX app. Sounds pretty nerdy! http://pksml.net/antipixel_ajax

AJAX links:
* http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/views ... ering+Ajax
* http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/j ... index.html